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MY Ergonomic Advice
5 Ways to Maintain Your Mental Health While Working From Home
With the world on lockdown due to the Coronavirus (COVID-19), work from home set-ups have increased worldwide. Meetings have been replaced by video calls and office spaces have been brought to bedrooms and couches. With all this rush for productivity, companies have been striving for more output and are demanding more from their employees. Working from home might seem like the new normal but what does that mean for mental health?
Working from home is something practiced in a number of industries. To put things into perspective, let’s take a look at survey conducted in 2019 by the cloud infrastructure company, Digital Ocean. They found that majority of their remote tech employees felt burnt out. With a whopping 82% of employees feeling stressed and overworked, it comes to no surprise that deteriorating mental health is a risk for many. At the root of this, 52% stated that they are working longer hours and 40% felt the need contribute more than their office counterparts. Stress, long hours and eventual burnout can lead to mental health issues such as anxiety and depression.
If you’re feeling this way, remember that you aren’t alone. Here are a few tricks you can use to help you combat the challenges of maintaining your mental health while working from home.
Indulge in self-care
Weather it’s reaching out to a mental healthcare professional or something as simple as eating healthy, remembering to take time to take care of yourself can ultimately make you more productive. Self-care might seem like an escape from productivity but it’s actually the key to it. A healthy body leads to a healthy mind and that goes both ways. When we say ‘indulge’, we really mean take as much as you can get and grow from it. It isn’t about excess; it’s about allowing yourself to love you a little better.
Maintai
Stress and Back Pain: 8 Ways to Get Relief for Both
Most people think of back pain as a physical issue, but stress and negative emotions often contribute. If you’re stuck with ongoing discomfort, or even disability, knowing how to address the emotional side of pain can help you change the situation.
Pain sufferers often overlook or avoid emotional contributors to pain because of pressure to perform, shame about emotional challenges, and a lack of support for developing emotional health.
Thankfully, the situation is changing. Groundbreaking work by physicians like Dr. John Sarno has shed light on the connection between emotion and pain and provided relief to thousands.
The growing popularity of emotional intelligence and mindfulness practices has also been shifting attitudes toward emotions, and new scientific findings are providing physical proof of the mind-body connection.
Solutions for Reducing Stress and Relieving Pain
So let’s look at a few simple ways to get started taking some of the emotional weight off your back.
1. The TMS Approach
In his bestselling book Healing Back Pain, Dr. Sarno described a new diagnosis for chronic pain, which he termed Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS) and a simple approach to resolve it.
He believed that ongoing emotional stress, especially unconscious anger, causes the body to tighten, which prevents your muscles from getting enough oxygen. When that happens, you get pain.
He found over many decades working with thousands of patients that simply by understanding their condition as emotional, they often got better.
Working at a Standing Desk Might Make You a Better Thinker
The dangers of sitting have become a hot topic in the health sphere in the past few years, with some critics going as far as to call sitting “the new smoking.” While dramatic, the statement isn’t wrong. With smoking out of the way as one of the most dangerous threats to public health, the sitting epidemic takes the lead.
A study published in September found that no matter how much you exercise, sitting for excessively long periods of time is a risk factor for early death. The longer the duration of periods of sitting, the greater damage to your cardiovascular health over time.
Not only will standing during the workday help you avoid the dangers of excessive sitting, but a new study finds evidence that standing might actually make you a better thinker.
The study, conducted by researchers at Tel Aviv University, found that standing enabled a quicker response to new information than sitting. To come to this conclusion, the researchers asked two groups of volunteers to complete a cognitive exercise called the Stroop test while either sitting or standing, respectively.
The Stroop test is based on the Stroop effect, which is the name used to describe the lag time our brains experience when attempting to process contradictory stimuli or information at once. You may have taken a Stroop test yourself at one point or another. In a Stroop test, you are presented with a list of colors spelled out, some printed in the corresponding color it names (the word ‘blue’ in blue ink), and some in a different color (the word ‘blue’ in red ink).
The test measures how quickly you are able to identify the colors. When the colors of the ink are mismatched to the printed names, it takes us a little longer to identify each color than it
How Do HR Help Employees Release Work-Related Stress?
Do you know that you spend about 35 percent of your life at work? Considering all the stress you are under during your time in the office, it seems as if a third of your life is wasted on worries and bad feelings. Our bodies are not designed to be under stress for such a long time. Eventually, we give up, and we face a variety of unpleasant effects.
Stressed-out employees suffer from chronic conditions and experience the decrease in brain activity. As a result, the productivity drops, and the company suffers from an unexpected profit loss. That’s why it’s vital for HR departments to come up with efficient methods to help employees release work-related stress.
5 Signs Your Employees Are Under Work-Related Stress
1. Loss of appetite – Stress-out people experience a loss of appetite, which leads to weight loss and lack of energy.
2. Irritation and aggression – When employees are under a lot of stress, they become irritated and aggressive. Their behavioral patterns change drastically without a visible reason.
3. Lack of socializing – Stressed-out people stop being social. They tend to avoid others during lunchtime and prefer working on their own.
4. Becoming difficult – When employees are under stress at work, they become difficult to cope with even when it comes to matters outside the workspace.
5. Feeling ill - stressed-out people are more prone to various diseases. If your employees start calling in sick often, it could be a sign of work-related stress.
Research has shown that about 80 percent of workers are under stress at their workplaces. Half of them admit they need help with stress management. More than 40 percent of workers believe their co-workers require stress management assistance.
4 Ways Standing Desks Improve Employee Productivity
If somebody told you that making one simple change to your work habits could increase your productivity by almost 50%, you’d probably be more than a little skeptical. But one study by the Texas A&M Health Science Center School of Public Health found that call center employees were 46% more productive when they used sit-stand desks.
Like ride-sharing apps, smartphones, and streaming services, standing desks are a trend that started in Silicon Valley and has spread throughout the country. Companies like Facebook and Google have provided standing desks for their employees for years now. Facebook employees were singing the praises of standing desks all the way back in 2011.
In recent years, more and more companies have started providing standing desks as a way to improve employee well-being, encourage collaboration, and increase productivity. The number of employers offering sit-stand desks and height-adjustable desks for employees has increased by over 30% in the last five years.
The numbers supporting the positive impact standing desks have on productivity are impressive. That’s because there are multiple different physical and psychological benefits of using a standing desk that each contribute to the overall increase in productivity.
Boosts Brain Power
Standing stimulates circulation, which sends more oxygen and nutrients t
This Standing Desk Riser Goes Up And Down, But Your Productivity And Health Will Only Go Up
Many years ago, I spent a summer interning at a place at which all the workers had standing desks. Well, it would be accurate to call it a rising desk. When you needed to stand, you could raise it to a level so you could stand and work. When you needed to sit, you could lower it to typical office drone desk level. As someone who has always suffered from back problems, this was a game changer. Typically, at the end of a long work day sitting (and sometimes slumping) in my office chair, I’d have an ever-so-slight back pain I’d self-medicate with either an Advil or a stiff drink. The summer I could spend part of the day standing? No back pain. It was a minor miracle.
Unfortunately, no job I’ve had since then has provided standing desks for their employees. Ergo, more slouching, more back pain, etc. And not only does sitting down for too long lead to bad posture, it also leads to back work habits. It is so easy to lose focus when you are sitting in one place staring at a backlit screen for hours and hours on end each day.
Then, just this month, I got this rising desk from FlexiSpot. It is a tabletop device you set upon your regular desk to turn it into a standing desk. When it first arrived, I figured it would be a pain to set up. I could not have been more wrong. While it comes with a detailed set of instructions making sure nothing could go awry in the process, “setting it up” was as easy as taking it out of the box and putting it on top of my desk. There is a subsequent step in which you can attach the keyboard tray it comes with. The keyboard tray is quite useful if you use a keyboard at your desk (and especially useful for achieving the optimum height differential between your typing and your screens). But my favorite part about it it how easily removable it is. I don’t use a separate keyboard besides my laptop.
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